Representing manufacturing features to support design and process changes

There are several parametric or variational feature-based solid modeling design tools that aid the user in productively creating a product design. However, most of these systems do not address mapping from the design feature to the manufacturing feature. In this thesis, a new approach for representing manufacturing features that integrate with design features using the ISO 10303 STEP product definition standard is presented. The new feature representation extends the STEP AP203 entities with feature definitions in a similar way that AP224 the working draft of STEP Features does. The manufacturing features presented here provide a means to link design changes to manufacturing feature and/or process changes.;Currently, most systems depend on humans to detect and propagate design and process changes to manufacturing features and plans. Towards solving this problem, a new manufacturing feature representation has been developed that can detect a design or process change and correct some or at a minimum flag the manufacturing engineer where the change affects manufacturing operations. A Manufacturing Feature in this work, is defined as a collection of faces and edges. It is important that these faces and edges can be uniquely identified in the design feature representation. The STEP entity Shape Aspect is used to permanently name the face or edge. The features in this research are built from expressions that references the design feature's faces and edges that can be reevaluated to propagate a design change.